I have the internet to thank for many of my hobbies, including crocheting and baking. I’ve even fixed minor household issues with the help of some handy YouTube clips, and probably wouldn’t have built the skincare routine I swear by without some input from online forums like Reddit.
But when it comes to short-term videos – the ones we scroll through endlessly on social media sites – learning from educational content might be an illusion, a new paper has found.
The study, published in Communications Psychology, found that while the clips grab our attention and keep us engaged, they might impair our ability to actually remember what we’ve learned.
The research relied on three studies
The study authors conducted three studies comparing short-form educational videos with more conventional teaching methods.
They took ten-minute documentary footage and chopped it down into multiple social-media-style short-form videos. Though these were far shorter, they contained all the same information as the longer footage.
The studies found that:
1) Students were less likely to remember short-form video footage in both the short and longer term
In the first study, researchers didn’t tell 180 students they were being tested. They showed short clips to some and the uninterrupted documentary footage to others, then surprised both groups with a quiz on the videos both right after they’d watched them and a day later.
People who consumed the shorter-form content performed worse on the immediate quiz.
Then, they told a group of 185 students to pay attention to the videos they were watching because they were about to be quizzed. Those who watched the short-form version of the footage fared worse on the immediate test and scored lower again the day after.
2) MRI scans showed that shorter-form video content activated different parts of the brain
The researchers also put 59 new participants into an MRI scanner and watched their brains as they consumed either documentary or short-form video footage.
Those who watched the longer-form content saw better synchronisation of the superior parietal lobulem, a part of the brain responsible for attention and integrating sensory and visual inputs. This was also true of the precuneus, which orchestrates things like self-awareness, episodic memory, and making sense of visual events.
Basically, it looked like the documentary watchers’ brains were building mental “maps” of the information.
The brains of the participants who watched the short-form content, though, only synchronised the regions that deal with in-the-moment attention and short-term focus. They were more alert, but that alertness might have actually worked against their memory formation rather than assisting it.
3) Short-form videos seemed to break a connection key to memory formation
Lastly, the researchers measured functional connectivity, or how well different regions of participants’ brains communicated with one another, when watching different content.
To form a memory that sticks, the parts of our minds that handle visual and auditory input have to “talk to” the sections responsible for executive control and decision-making.
But this research showed that short-form content seemed to break that communication. Essentially, their minds seemed so busy processing the stimuli placed in the more action-packed format that they didn’t have as much capacity to bundle it away into a lasting memory, too.
The paper said this could mean “the fragmented and rapidly switching nature of typical social media short videos enhances bottom-up attentional capture at the expense of top-down cognitive processes critical for deep learning and long-term memory consolidation”.
In other words, though you might be taking in more in the short term, you could be learning less in the long run.
